John Tran > John's Quotes

“The future starts today, not tomorrow.”
― Pope John Paul II

“It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; He is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is He who provoked you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is He who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.

It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.”
― Pope John Paul II

“Artistic talent is a gift from God and whoever discovers it in himself has a certain obligation: to know that he cannot waste this talent, but must develop it.”
― Pope John Paul II

“The worst prison would be a closed heart.”
― Pope John Paul II

“Friendship, as has been said, consists in a full commitment of the will to another person with a view to that person's good.”
― Pope John Paul II, Love and Responsibility

“Love between man and woman cannot be built without sacrifices and self-denial.”
― John Paul II, Love and Responsibility

“ This is no time to be ashamed of the Gospel. It is the time to preach it from the rooftops. Do not be afraid to break out of comfortable and routine modes of living in order to take up the challenge of making Christ known in the modern metropolis. ”
― Pope John Paul II

“Life is entrusted to man as a treasure which must not be squandered, as a talent which must be used well.”
― Pope John Paul II

“...all that is carried along
by the stream's silvery cascade,
rhythmically falling from the mountain,
carried by its own current--
carried where?”
― Pope John Paul II

“On one hand the eternal attraction of man towards femininity (cf. Gn. 2:23) frees in him-or perhaps it should free-a gamut of spiritual-corporal desires of an especially personal and "sharing" nature (cf. analysis of the "beginning"), to which a proportionate pyramid of values corresponds. On the other hand, "lust" limits this gamut, obscuring the pyramid of values that marks the perennial attraction of male and female.”
― Pope John Paul II, Purity of the Heart: Reflections on Love And Lust

“The true Christian can nurture a trustful optimism, because he is certain of not walking alone. In sending us Jesus, the eternal Son made man, God has drawn near to each of us. In Christ he has become our travelling companion.”
― Pope John Paul II

“Without wonder, men and women would lapse into deadening routine and little by little would become incapable of a life which is genuinely personal.”
― Pope John Paul II

“Could God have justified Himself before human history, so full of suffering, without placing Christ's Cross at the center of that history? . . . But God, who besides being Omnipotence is Wisdom and--to repeat once again--Love, desires to justify Himself to mankind. He is not the Absolute that remains outside of the world, indifferent to human suffering. he is Emmanuel, God-with-us, a God who shares man's lot and participates in his destiny.”
― Pope John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope

“Pope John Paul II returned to this theme, condemning state-recognized same-sex unions as parodic versions of authentic families, “based on individual egoism” rather than genuine love. Justifying that condemnation, he observed, “Such a ‘caricature’ has no future and cannot give future to any society”. Queers must respond to the violent force of such constant provocations not only by insisting on our equal right to the social order’s prerogatives, not only by avowing our capacity to promote that order’s coherence and integrity, but also by saying explicitly what Law and the Pope and the whole of the Symbolic order for which they stand hear anyway in each and every expression or manifestation of queer sexuality: Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop.”
― Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive

“The ethos of redemption is realied in self-mastery, by means of temperance, that is, continence of desires.”
― Pope John Paul II, Blessed Are the Pure of Heart

“A person is an entity of a sort to which the only proper and adequate way to relate is love.”
― John Paul II, Love and Responsibility

“Humankind, which discovers its capacity to transform and in a certain sense create the world through its own work, forgets that this is always based on God's prior and original gift of things that are. People think that they can make arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to their wills, as though the earth did not have its own requisites and a prior God-given purpose, which human beings can indeed develop but must not betray.”
― Pope John Paul II

“It is unbecoming for a cardinal to ski badly.”
― Pope John Paul II